I want to start this by apologising for the past week's experience that we have all had with the site. It's been apparent for quite a while that the performance of the server that we were sat on at Viewsnet was degrading, but in the past week it obviously degraded in an extremely swift, crippling and unnerving manner. It was suggested by Ed a long time ago that we mvoe servers, and I decided against that for various reasons. Clearly, I made the wrong decision on that count and I apologise for it.
Since the problem became apparent though, I have acted as quickly as I have been able to in order to move us to a new server with a new host - where we now sit. We are now no longer on a shared hosting platform, and instead have our own VPS with guaranteed resources and significantly greater access. We are also no longer using the PostgreSQL DBMS, and now sit instead on a MySQL system. You should all be able to see the effects of this already through page load times, but it is of significantly greater benefit than that under the hood. For the first time in several years we now have fully operational administrative systems - something which will allow us much greater control over our own server and applications. Similarly, we have full access regarding what we install and configure on the server itself, as well as the ability to make operational changes to it (reboot, terminate processes, rebuild, etc) should problems arise. These benefits should hopefully help protect us against situations such as that of of the last several months in future.
Thankfully, I had taken a complete backup of our database two weeks prior to this incident (August 16th). This means that I have a complete set of all of our data up until that point, though sadly the data from the two weeks following (or one week, since for a week of that time the server was basically completely inaccessible) has been lost. I apologise profusely for this, but don't feel that I really had any choice at the end of the day. I have been unable to access any administrative functions at Viewsnet for the duration of the problem, and was concerned enough about the general state of the server (and, in all honesty, whether we would get decent service back at all) that I felt it was impossible to put off this move until I was able to get a more recent backup. I hope everyone is ok with, and can accept that.
That said, things are not yet perfect here. At present only the forum and the majority of the main site have been restored onto the server, and the database has not yet been completely restored either (again, aside from those parts of the database relating to the forums and the main site). Similarly, the forum skin has had to be completely rewritten over the last week in order to make it possible for us to use it on this newer version of phpBB3 - and as a result of that short timeframe, it's not completely finished yet. Moderators will notice the MCP is presently incorrectly styled, and everyone else will notice that the Spoiler and Youtube BBCode's are not currently working.
I am working as fast as I can to bring everything else online and finish of the forum skin, but this is a time consuming process and I made the judgement that it was better to bring the forums/site online in their present state than to extend our already significant downtime further. I will update this thread as and when significant progress is made relating to the remaining areas of the site. Until then, please be patient, and I am sorry for any inconvenience the transitional period will cause.
I would like to make a note of special thanks to Ed and Messiah here too, who have been of great help in dealing with our domain names. Ed in particular has been pestered by me quite incessantly for the last two weeks, and continues to work on getting the shatteredstar.com domain pointed at this new server (.org and .net should already be pointed here). I am sure both will be glad to know I'll no longer need to be running to them like a headless chicken, but I hope both know how much I appreciate their help
I will close by asking that if anyone encounter bugs and/or issues with any part of the site or the forums, please either post them here or bring them to me via e-mail/PM/IRC. I will deal with them as quickly as possible and update here.
Again, my apologies for the last week. I hope you enjoy our new home.
- Anny
to everyone involved in this. So nice to have forums that work and load quickly.
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